Hannah Lynch

“ Mary Jane's mother came over to stay with us while nurse drove off to town. Stevie knelt in his eternal position, with his cheek against his open palm and cushions piled around him. He did not speak, but stared out of the window.
I went and sat with "Robinson Crusoe" on the window-ledge, to watch nurse's departure and wave my hand to her. Not to wave my hand from the window and blow kisses to her would be to miss the best part of the fun of this unexpected incident.
The world outside rested in the unbroken stillness of noon. ”

“ I had not precisely killed anybody, but had I not desired to kill Sister Esmeralda the day I threw the stool at her?
And so we travelled conscientiously, like humble, but, in the very secret depths of our being, self-admiring pilgrims, over the weary and profitless road of self-examination, and assured ourselves with a fervent thrill that we were indeed miserable sinners. "I'll never get into a passion again," I swore to Polly Evans, like a monstrous little Puritan, and before an hour had passed was thirsting for the blood of some offender. ”

“ In youth, sorrow fells us to-day, and joy awakes us [Pg 270] to-morrow. It is always—Land may be in sight to-morrow! The night is dark, but hope dances blithely through our veins with the delicious assurance that to-morrow brings the sun. The world is empty, but vague dreams tell us that to-morrow love will cross our path and fill the universe. Hope is the magician that waved us forward and carried us recklessly through briar and bramble, with undaunted confidence in life, in ourselves, and in all things around us. Each fall was ever the last, each pang the precursor of eternal happiness. ”

“ It is only when I observe how feebly and shabbily a spoiled woman can face trouble and pain, that I feel one may with reason cherish some pride of the power of enduring both with a smile. And when, stupefied and shamed, I contemplate the petty trickeries to which worldliness and untruthfulness can reduce a woman, the infamous devices a slender purse can drag educated ladies into, thus am I partially consoled for the sufferings of childhood. ”

“ I slipped off my chair, and ran out into the hall.
A ragged little follow sat on the doorstep, crying as if his heart would burst. I raced down the steps, and sat by his side to comfort him. He had cut his foot, and I asked him if it would not hurt less if he had some apples to eat. Crab-apples always soothed my own immeasurable woes and lightened the pangs of solitude for me. The weeping boy looked at me sullenly, and nodded.
In I flew again and came out with the coppers grasped in my jammy palm, and holding the bowl of damson jam tightly wedged between my pinafore and both hands. ”

“ My dislike of large families is born of the conviction that every large family holds a victim. Amid so many, there is always one isolated creature who weeps in frozen secrecy, while the others shout with laughter. The unshared gaiety of the group is a fresh provocation of repulsion on both sides, and not all the good-will of maturity can serve to bridge that first sharp division of infancy. The heart that has been broken with pain in childhood is never sound again, whatever the sequel the years may offer. ”

“ For him, when humanity is cold and unobservant—as humanity too often is in the eyes of childhood—does he so gallantly play the martyr, the hero, the sufferer in proud silence. For his admiration did a little sister of mine once put her hand in the fire. She thought it was heroic, like the early Christians, and hoped her guardian angel would applaud, while common elders shouted in angry alarm.
Ah, never prate so idly of the artlessness and the guilelessness of children. They are as full of vanity and innocent guile and all the arts and graces as the puppies and kittens we adore. ”

“ It was our first kiss and our last. The impulsive affection of my embrace pleased him, and he kept my cheek near his for some moments, while in silence we both gazed out upon the blotch of dusty green that mingled with the pale blue of the sky. I feared to move or even wink an eyelid, this new mood of Stevie's so awed me.
"You may have my books and my penknife," said Stevie, breaking the spell. "They're awful nice books. Grandpa gave them to me. I'll explain the pictures to-morrow. But perhaps you wouldn't like boys' books, Angela," he said, dejectedly, and scanned my face in a humble way. ”

“ Time to a child is so unequal a matter. A month may seem a century, a year appear vaguer than a dream. Indeed, I have never yet been able to tell myself how long a space of time actually separated my good-bye to Kildare and my departure for England. Multiplied experiences combined to mislead me.
Simultaneously with the opening of the cab-door opened the big door of my stepfather's house, and a group of little golden heads showed in the dark frame. Feet and hands and voluble lips and eyes played together, and for a very brief while I enjoyed the sensations of a heroine. ”

“ To have cried in childhood as I cried then, incessantly and for months, sometimes for the greater part of the day under a bed, that none of these mocking young creatures might see me and laugh at me; to have stood so intolerably alone among so many, without a hand to dry my eyes, a kiss to comfort me, a soft breast against which I could rest my tired little head and sob out my tale of sorrow,—this is to start permanently maimed for the battle of life. ”

“ I spent a week in retreat down in the town convent, and walked for hours up and down the high-walled garden discoursing with precocious unctuousness to my good friend Mother Aloysius, who, naïve soul, was lost in wonder and admiration of my gravity and sanctimoniousness. I meditated and examined my conscience with a vengeance. I delighted in the conviction of my past wickedness, and was so thrilled with the sensation of being a converted sinner that, like Polly Evans, gladly would I have revived the medieval custom of public confession. ”

“ These are trifles to read of, but what is a trifle in childhood? A child feeds greedily upon its own excesses of sensation, thrives upon them, or is consumed by them. To these early terrors, these accumulated emotions, these swift alternations of anguish and rapture, which made opening [Pg 93] existence for me a sort of swing, perpetually flying and dropping between tears and laughter, from radiant heights, without transition, to pitch darkness, do I attribute the nervous illnesses that have so remorselessly pursued me in after-years. The wonder is the mind itself did not give way. ”

“ As each child received a hamper, not quite so bountifully and curiously filled as mine, for my stepfather was a typical Irishman—in the matter of hospitality, of generosity, he always erred on the right side for others, and was as popular as a prince of legend,—for a fortnight we revelled in a fairyland of toffee and turkey, of sugared cakes and plum-pudding, of crackers and sweets, and apples and oranges and bewitching toys. ”

“ Had her life lain among the roses, such ignorance as hers might be pardoned in her teachers. But to send out into the world, to earn her living among selfish and indifferent strangers, a young girl of such bewildering exquisiteness, and never once hint to her the kind of perils that would beset her, give her no knowledge of man, nor of herself, nor of nature! This is an iniquity the nuns of Southampton can never be pardoned.
Now that I know the sequel, and understand what the beginning meant, I cannot recall our laughter over Molly's first experiences without a thrill of horror. ”

“ Chapter XXII. A PRINCESS OF LEGEND.
"Is childhood dead?" Lamb asks; "is there not in the best some of the child's heart left, to respond to its earliest enchantments?" Can I now, without a responsive thrill, see myself flash into the unaltered dulness of that Kildare village, a little princess of legend, with the glory of foreign travel about me, the overseas cut of frock and shoes, the haughty and condescending consciousness of superiority? ”

“ Not a white rose anywhere, but red upon red, through every tone from crimson to pink. Is it an exaggeration of imagination, or were the Lysterby lanes and gardens rivers of red, like the torrent-beds of the Greek isles when the oleander is a-bloom? For, looking back to the summers of Lysterby, I see nothing on earth but roses, multiplied like the daisies of the field, a whole county waving perfumed red in memory of the great historic house whose emblem in a memorable war was the red rose of Lysterby. ”

“ It is so easy to make a child happy that it is a [Pg 69] mystery to me how the art is not universal with grown-up persons.
Among the blurred memories of days so remote is a ball given in the big town house. The excitement could not but reach us up-stairs beneath the stars. The nurse and housemaid were equally aflame, and stood watching the guests from the corner of the topmost landing, that commanded a glimpse of the drawing-room lobby. The rustle of silk and the sort of perfumed chatter that belongs to gatherings in full dress reached us, broken and vague like the beautiful fancies of dreams. ”

“ She had left a Tipperary village to become a lady of Mercy in the English convent, and to her was intrusted the care of my deported self. In religion her name was Sister Clare, and the impression she has left on me is that of an inoffensive policeman masquerading in woman's attire, with limbs too long for a decorous management of them, honest, cold blue eyes, and, instead of the vivid hues of life upon the lean cheek, discoloured parchment drawn without a wrinkle tightly over the high-boned impassible visage. ”

“ While he, her vindictive enemy, mean unnatural little body, sheathing a base, affected, silly little soul, fiddling and scraping away his days which were neither dignified nor manly, he offered himself to the unlimited contempt of even such microscopic humanity as ours. We felt he was not a man with the large capacity of manhood, but a disgraced and laughable thing, a puppet moving upon springs and speaking artificially, manufactured as dolls are, for the delectation of little folk.
We enjoyed Mr. Parker, but we never regarded him as more human than the clown or the harlequin of the pantomime. ”

“ Nothing enchanted my mother more than an unexpected revelation of intelligence in one of her children. She was a woman of colossal intelligence, of wide knowledge, a brilliant talker, and at all times, whatever her temper, you could put her instantly into good-humour, and wean her thoughts from the irritating themes of daily life, by addressing yourself to her intellect, and speaking of remote subjects like the constellations, South Africa, the Federal war, Belgian farming, or the German Empire. ”

“ If my mother had been an early Christian or a socialist, she could not have shown herself a more inveterate enemy of personal property. Never through infancy, youth, or middle age has she permitted any of her offspring to preserve relics, gifts, or souvenirs. Treasures of every kind she pounced upon, and either destroyed or gave away,—partly from a love of inflicting pain, partly from an iconoclastic temper, but more than anything from a despotic ferocity of self-assertion. ”

“ All this hilarity does not imply the total absence of sadness in those bright days. I had lived and suffered too long in solitude not to have reserved a private corner for unuttered griefs, into which no regard of sister or stranger could ever penetrate. It is extraordinary the art with which a circle of children can make one chosen by mutual consent feel in all things, at every moment of the day, an intruder. ”

“ The start in Lysterby ends my patient martyrdom. Here I became the active and abominable little fiend unkindness and ill-management made of one of the gentlest and most sensitive of natures. The farther I travelled the road of childhood the more settled became my conviction that grown-up humanity, which I gradually began to loath more than even I once had feared, was my general implacable enemy. ”

“ Parker, with his simpering disgusted air of ill-natured little dandy, flourished a perfumed handkerchief about her face, to sustain his affronted nerves, no doubt, placed an arm gingerly about the flat square waist, clasped her outer hand in evident revulsion, and began to scamper and drag her round the room in the steps of a wild schottische. Most of us tittered—could we be expected to measure the misery of the girl, while nature made us excruciatingly alive to the absurdity of her tormentor? ”

“ Chapter VI. GRANDFATHER CAMERON.
The unhappiest little child that ever drew breath has immediate compensations between the dark hours undreamed of by elders. One of the persons that lent the relief of sparkle to those sombre months, and by whose aid I wandered blithely enough down the sunny avenues of imagination, which, like a straight road running into the sky, lead to Paradise, was my Scottish grandfather.
Grandpapa was a sombre-visaged little gentleman, not in the least like his formidable daughter. ”